One has to admire the audacity of "Hard Core Logo," a nasty but fun Canadian film about the reunion of a famous Vancouver punk band. It's black comedy presented as in-your-face documentary.

"Hard Core Logo," opening today at the Lumiere, is accomplished independent filmmaking, acted with immediacy and comic brilliance, and its faux-documentary style is edged with outrage. Is it really all fake? Is this chaotic band of whacked-out geniuses really being played by actors?

In fact, there never was a punk band called Hard Core Logo. The movie is based on Michael Turner's novel of the same name. But the film even creates a history for the band as having been formed in 1976 by a couple of Vancouver juvenile offenders and gaining a taste of fame with an indie record, "Son of a Bitch to the Core."

Director Bruce McDonald ("Dance Me Outside") has turned out a tight, fascinating on-the-road rock movie, a delicious study in mean-spiritedness as well as the gut imperatives that make punk music the unsettling, hostile experience it is. Some might even come away wishing that most punk rock were as good as the stuff performed onscreen. Music was contributed by Lick the Pole, Flash Bastard and D.O.A.

Hugh Dillon, a real-life rock musician, plays Joe Dick, the abrasive leader of the band. Callum Keith Rennie is Billy Tallent, a gifted guitar player, and Bernie Coulson and John Pyper-Ferguson are the drummer and bassist, one a perverse redneck, the other a mental case.

When the band's legendary mentor, Bucky Haight of the band Nazis in the White House (played by Julian Richards), loses a leg in a shooting, the boys undertake a cross-Canada benefit tour. But almost the minute they reunite, the old hostilities that drove them to break up surface again.

The film is fresh and bold. McDonald's comedy admirably interweaves difficult clashing personalities that manage to bond around music, however twisted.

The Canadian setting -- not readily associated with punker angst -- may hold an odd appeal for American audiences. Hard-core types raging in the morning cold against a Canadian Rockies backdrop make a curiously exotic image.